Bonny and Blithe and Good and Gay
by erburnham02
Summary: "Hi Fitz. Your vitals are normal again today, like I told you this morning. You're doing as well as you always do..." "D'you remember when you used to call me 'Ma bonny lass' and then you'd catch yourself and blush so red..." "You need to wake up and call me your bonny lass again, Leo. Please..." Simmons is not going mad. She just needs to talk to her best friend. Her love.


**Bonny and Blithe and Good and Gay**

Jemma crept into Fitz's hospital room at 11:00PM. Unsurprisingly, she couldn't sleep. She had gone to sleep at nine as usual, Director Coulson's orders, and woken up at quarter to eleven, breathing hard, her arms waving madly as she fruitlessly tried to swim to the surface of the ocean of her nightmares. And Fitz.

Oh, Fitz.

It had been the worst dream of all, the one where he was too heavy for her to hold and she let him go, slip down into the dark depths of the sea. She put her hand up to her face to wipe the tears away, but they kept coming. She needed to be with her best friend, her love, talk to him again even though it made her team think she was mad, talking to a comatose man.

Her auburn hair swung over her shoulder, messy and unkempt. She needed Fitz to tie it up like he always had, and he needed her to fix his own tangled curls like she did every day. She couldn't do it, though, or the team would suspect something was wrong.

Well, of course something was wrong! Fitz was unconscious! He might never talk to her again, so why shouldn't she talk to him? She was really trying to get on with her work, but she'd become so used to having him around that it was difficult. Though her physics was exemplary, she had only the most rudimentary knowledge of engineering, and the team really needed an engineer.

They knew, however, if they ever tried to hire a different engineer again then he would certainly get what they had come to call the "Simmons Fire Extinguisher Treatment." That had happened to Bobby McCabe. They had thought another British lab partner would make her more content. Ha! A nice enough boy, but he just wasn't that smart, he just wasn't Fitz, and when he had shown her his umpteenth crudely sketched design for an improvement to the Night-Night gun, she had lost patience.

Did they realise how dangerous it was to remove all the extinguishers from the lab? That wasn't health and safety, that was stupidity.

"Hi, Fitz," she sighed, sitting down on her chair by his bedside. "Your vitals are normal again today, like I told you this morning. You're doing as well as you always do. You know, apart from that, I think I've exhausted all the topics of conversation we usually talk about. Doctor Who. Harry Potter. The latest biochemical and engineering theories and papers. I've even told you stories about when we were young."

She sat back and thought. "Ah. Do you remember when you told me how to calculate the day of the week on any given date, to find what day we were born on? And then you taught me that rhyme? 'Monday's child is fair of face', etc. We had a lot of fun finding out that, for instance, Christy Burgess from Aeronautics class had far to go. Well, she was from Australia so I guess that one was true. And that Trevor Dobson from Chemical Engineering was loving and giving... which made us doubt the rhyme a bit. Then I told you I was Wednesday's child, which you said was definitive proof the rhyme was wrong. I was as far from 'full of woe' as you had ever seen. I don't think that's true anymore." She sniffed a bit. "I've been calculating the team's birth-dates and I think the rhyme has a bit of a point..."

She held Fitz's hand in hers, tracing the lines on his palm, which she knew as well as her own. Better.

"Ward was born on a Monday, but I've been doing my best not to think about him. Tuesday's child is full of grace. May, of course. Wednesday's child is full of woe. That's me, at least at the moment. Thursday's child has far to go. That's Coulson. Friday's child is loving and giving. That's Skye. Saturday's child works hard for his living. That's Trip. And the child that is born on the Sabbath day, is bonny and blithe and good and gay." She was really crying now, tears dripping onto the hospital blanket that covered her soulmate. "That's you, Fitz. D'you remember how you sometimes used to call me 'Ma bonny lass'," she imitated his brogue, "and then you'd catch yourself and blush so red it looked like you had severe sunburn? You were burnt, more often than not. Freckles too. Thirty degrees* and sunny with it, most summers at the Academy." She smiled through her tears, remembering. "You need to wake up and call me your bonny lass again, Leo. Please."

She had asked him that every day since he had sacrificed himself to save her, every day since he had confessed his love to her, every day since he had gone into a coma from oxygen deprivation. Every day since she had told the anxiously waiting team that he was alive. What a poor word for the state he was in, but it was the only adjective she could think of, the only positive thing she could focus on. Jemma Simmons' logical, mathematical, scientific brain told her that Leo Fitz might not be alive much longer.

She gave one last sob and a rather undignified hiccup, then prepared to put on a stiff upper lip once again, for the team's benefit really. But just as she got up to leave, a slight gasp came from the hospital bed. She whirled around, eyes wide with mad hope.

"Bon-" Fitz's lips were cracked and dry. He took another breath. "Bon-nee."

"Yes!" she cried. "Yes! Bonny and blithe and good and gay, oh, I love you, Leo!"

"Love you too, Jemma," he whispered. "I love you, ma bonny lass."

THE END

*Note that Jemma measures this temperature in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit.


End file.
